Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“Right,” Razorface answered. “You inferrin’ we should toss this place?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir, I am.”

It was a nice thing, Razorface reflected a few minutes later, bending to pull a steamer trunk out from under Maker’s cot, to hear a cop say sir and sound like he actually meant it. It was a big trunk, the ridged high-impact plastic shell battered and gouged, and it was secured with a thumb lock. “What about this?”

“Looks as likely as anything.” Mitch was rooting through the roughly hung cabinets under the hand-built wooden table in the far corner. The cop sat back on his heels and Razorface heard a thump. “Damn!” Standing, rubbing the back of his head with one hand, Mitch walked back. He winced and leaned down. “Thumb lock.”

“No shit,” Razorface growled. “Tell me something useful.” He shot a sidelong glance at the smug young cop. Mitch didn’t even have the decency to grimace a little as he squatted down beside the trunk and the gangster.

Mitch ran stubby fingers over the surface of the lock. “Dusty,” he muttered. Boris, finished with his dinner, wandered over to scrub his face against Mitch’s knee, and the cop scratched the cat absently with his other hand. “There’s a trick to these old ones.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

The cop shot him a grinning glance. “Watch this.” Mitch slipped a cash chit and a switchblade out of his corduroys, flicking the latter open. He slid the thin slip of plastic into the crack between the lid and the body of the trunk until it butted up against the catch. Razorface watched the long narrow knife blade with interest. Odd thing for a cop to have.

Holding it by the black rubber handle, Mitch levered it behind the thumb lock. A fat blue spark jumped clear, and Mitch jerked his hand off the knife, which clattered to the floor. “Fuck!” he hissed, and then he cackled. “Hah!”

The bolt had disengaged for a moment when the lock shorted and reset, and Mitch’s cash chit was now caught between the shaft and the lockplate. Grinning, he shook his shocked hand once and flipped the lid of the trunk back. “Holy…”

Face frowned at a sea of forest-green wool, fumes of cedar and camphor stinging his eyes. He had no idea what he was looking at. “What the hell is that? Uniforms?”

Mitch reached out and ran his fingers across the nap of the fabric, frowning for a long time before he nodded. “We shouldn’t be in here, Razor,” he said quietly.

“I know,” Razorface answered. “You gonna tell me what I’m looking at?”

“Master Warrant Officer Casey.” Mitch shook his head, letting the cloth fall back into tidy folds. “Damn. That Honda was registered to a Barbara Casey. It is her sister. Or sister-in-law, I guess.” Razorface watched as the cop lifted the clothes out carefully, one stack at a time. They were dusty and creased along the folds: these things hadn’t seen sunlight or air in a very long time.

One layer down, and Mitch found other things: an unlocked flat tin with a stack of papers in it, two powder-blue berets, and a cardboard box. One of the berets was torn and bloody: the other looked as if it had just been pressed and packed away. The cop set those aside, also.

With a gnawing sensation that he recognized as nostalgia, Razorface reached out and touched the undamaged beret. “Seen those before,” he said, thinking of acrid smoke and a slim young woman scrambling around piles of burning trash to drag his twelve-year-old self under cover. “What’s in the box?”

“I bet I know,” Mitch said. “Master Warrant Officer. That’s a big deal, Razorface. Some kinda expert rank. I figured she was a sergeant or something.”

“Private, when I met her.” A moment too late, Razorface realized that he had broken the cardinal rule and volunteered information. “Box.”

“I bet I know what that is. Hah. Yep.” Mitch folded the flaps open and started lifting smaller boxes up into the light. “Shit, look at that.”

A full hand of little flat cases. Razorface picked one up and angled it toward the light. A medal or something, hanging on a striped ribbon. “So?”

“I don’t know what the half of these are for, Razor. But I bet the baby blue on these here is for U.N. combat service. And look at this. That one — the red maple leaf on the star. I know what that one is. That’s valor in the face of the enemy. And a lot of these others just plain say what they’re for… South Africa, Brazil. New England. She must have been here when Canada loaned us troops during the food riots back in the thirties.”

“Yeah,” Razorface said. “I told you I knew her from way back.” Something uncomfortable writhed in his gut. This was a betrayal. It was wrong, and he knew it, but he shoved the thought back. Son of a bitch. It’s not like she’s been telling me shit.

Mitch was paying him no attention, fascinated with holding one bit of cloth and metal after another up to the light. “Ah. Here’s another one with a maple leaf on it. Those must be the important ones, you think?”

“I guess.” Less interested in military decorations, Razorface lifted the cardboard box out of the trunk and laid it on Mitch’s lap. Underneath were a series of crumbling colored paper binders, and two poly bubbles with holographic data storage devices packed inside. The bubbles were marked with a caduceus, a maple leaf, and a green-on-beige spiral that Razorface didn’t recognize.

“Jackpot,” Mitch gloated.

Razorface felt his bowels clench at the note in the cop’s voice. This is the wrong thing to be doing, he thought. You don’t do this kind of shit to your buds. “Whaddaya mean, jackpot?”

“Medical records, Razor. And her service records, too. This is exactly what we needed. Fucking A good job, man. Fucking A.”

There was something tucked in among them. Razor jerked his chin at the cream-colored bundle, as long as one of his own massive hands. “What that?”

“Let’s see. Chamois? Deerskin, I guess.” Deftly, the cop flipped the butter-soft skin open. “Oh, wow.” His hands hovered over the contents of the package, almost as if he were afraid to touch.

Razorface leaned forward, over his shoulder, almost forgetting to breathe. “Necklace. I seen some kids wear ’em.”

“Collar,” Mitch corrected. “It’s meant to be worn up around the throat.” He lifted the long cool polished spill of beads up into the light. Purple and some white, with an almost phantom sheen. The edges were stained as if with fresh blood. “Wampum. It’s polished quahog shells — purple for sorrow, white for purity of intention. The red stain means war.”

“How you know that?”

“Hell, Razor, I’m from Ledyard. My best friend in high school was Pequot. He knew all about this stuff. This is square-woven: you do it with a needle. And—” Mitch’s eyes dropped down, and Razor heard his breath catch in his throat. “Oh, fuck.”

“What?”

“I can’t touch that.” Mitch gestured at the item that had been hidden under the wampum collar. It took Razorface a moment to sort out what he was looking at, and then he shook his head slightly. Purple and red and black beads wound tight-sewn around the shaft of a mottled brown feather that looked long and strong enough to have come from a turkey.

Carefully, as if touching a small child or something holy, Mitch folded the collar and laid it back in the square of doeskin. Face tilted his head to one side. “What’s special about that?”

“It’s an eagle feather,” Mitch said, and covered it carefully before nestling it back in the bottom of the trunk. “And it worries me, because if she’s earned that, and she’s keeping it buried under her old clothes, it means she doesn’t think she deserves it anymore. Which really makes me wonder why .”